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Game Change

The Winter Olympics in Sochi, Russia, which begin on Feb. 7, are already raising the specter of awkward international confrontations; several countries, including the United States, have condemned Russian President Vladimir Putin’s crackdown on gays and restrictions on political protest ahead of the games. But sports have historically also brought less-than-friendly nations together—famously, China and the United States, whose players’ surprise meeting at the 1971 ping pong World Championships helped to open the door for President Richard Nixon’s historic visit to the People’s Republic the next year.

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How did that Sino-American rapprochement come to be? The long-accepted story is that the catalyst was a spontaneous burst of friendship between a hippie American table tennis player and a Chinese world champion. The narrative makes sense: Ping pong is a recreational game for suburban garages and frat houses, so how could it be anything other than benign? But that telling is a misreading of a pivotal event whose origins were more calculated than have been acknowledged—set in motion, it seems, by the Chinese government itself.

By 1971, ping pong, like the Olympics, already had a political history. The game had been codified, and the International Table Tennis Federation (ITTF) was founded in 1926, by the Honorable Ivor Montagu. The youngest son of the Baron Swaythling, one of England’s wealthiest men, Montagu was producing early Alfred Hitchcock films when he embarked on a parallel career as a Soviet propagandist and spy. The day he turned 21, the Cambridge student had left for Moscow, where his family’s extraordinary connections to prime ministers, royalty, generals and admirals were quickly noted.

Eager to prove himself to the Kremlin, Montagu would return to England and spend decades quietly working for the Soviets. A true communist believes that everything from family to food, film to sport, is political. By the 1950s, Montagu had already proved as much. He had persuaded Communist Party Chairman Mao Zedong and his deputy, Premier Zhou Enlai, to make ping pong the national game of China, inviting them into the ITTF and assuring their good treatment there. Not only did Montagu tap the Chinese to host their first World Championships, in 1961, but the surrounding publicity helped to cover up the real story: Somewhere between 17 and 44 million people had recently starved to death during the Great Leap Forward, Mao’s collectivization and industrialization program. No matter: China had built the world’s greatest table tennis stadium, and it hosted 33 countries and won most of the gold medals. Britain’s Foreign Office dismissed the championships as a “not entirely negligible fillip to the regime,” but that was missing the point. Propaganda isn’t always about promoting events—it can also be about obscuring them.

Come 1971, China would use ping pong politically yet again, but this time the challenge was more subtle than how to hide a famine; Mao and Zhou Enlai wanted no less than to spin the world on its head. The United States was the old enemy, and the Russians for years had been China’s fellow communists. But the Chinese relationship with Moscow had recently become strained to the point of war. Mao tired of seeing Russia and America divide up the world, and he wanted to forge a separate path for China. There was fighting along the Sino-Soviet border, which Mao followed by conducting two nuclear tests in China that were designed to carry fall-out over Soviet positions. Soviet diplomats were even feeling out their counterparts in Washington to see how the United States might react to a nuclear strike on Beijing.

Mao knew he had to produce a signal move to reach a détente with America and in turn deter the Soviet threat. Nixon was a willing partner, eager for Chinese help in negotiating with Hanoi over the war in Vietnam. He could also see the advantages of cooperating with the Chinese in order to worry the Soviets into warmer behavior. But both Mao and Nixon had similar concerns. Mao knew the idea of befriending the Americans could get him torn down by the radical left. Nixon was worried about his own right wing. Cozying up to the hated Red Chinese? What would Americans think?

In 1970, Chinese and American leaders began to move unsigned messages back and forth. But Nixon soon began to escalate the war in Vietnam, and by the beginning of 1971 the Chinese seemed to have retreated into silence.

The real problem still remained: It didn’t matter what the politicians wished to do. Without the support of their respective populations, Nixon and Mao’s imagined initiative was doomed. But how could mutual antagonism, held so deeply for more than 20 years, be diffused in a matter of days? Mao and Zhou Enlai had a very specific idea: ping pong.

* * *

The World Table Tennis Championships were due to return to Asia, to the Japanese city of Nagoya, in April 1971. Only 25 years earlier, during World War II, Nagoya had been a central target for U.S. bombing raids, an industrial hub that was home to Japan Aircraft and Mitsubishi Generator. Now an American ally would be hosting Team USA—and potentially the Chinese too.

Japan’s interest in China’s attendance at Nagoya can be traced to a world champion table tennis player, Tokyo native Ichiro Ogimura, who seized on an opportunity to lure the renowned Chinese team back to the international circuit. In 1970, after reading of the rising tensions between China and the Soviet Union, Ogimura, better known as Ogi, immediately fired off a telegram to Zhou Enlai. Over the previous decade, Zhou, an avid table tennis fan, had admired and then befriended the Japanese player. Ogi recommended that China’s “best opportunity lies in opening the door to the international community through the sport of table tennis.” He had received no answer from the premier.

It wasn’t surprising. China had essentially closed its borders after the start of the Cultural Revolution in 1966. Its national squad, by then the winner of three straight World Championships, had run afoul of the ever more radical Chinese government. Three of the team’s best coaches and players, including the country’s first world champion, had either committed suicide after a series of interrogations or been beaten to death. For almost five years, the outside world had no idea which of the players were dead and which were alive. They had not been allowed to leave the country.

To his surprise, in October 1970 Ogimura was invited to take part in a small cultural exchange program to celebrate a Chinese national holiday. Desperate to talk to the premier, Ogi was granted little more than a handshake at the event, but at 1 a.m. the following morning, he was called to visit Zhou at his office in the Great Hall of the People, where Ogi pleaded his case for China to send a team to Nagoya. Zhou was wary. “Can you imagine what kinds of trouble might occur?” he asked. “If something were to happen after you have personally involved the premier of a country, how will you take responsibility?” For the time, the case seemed closed.

By the end of the year, however, Ogi was back in China, on a trade mission to Guangzhou, under the guise of Ogimura Trading, his new company that exported ashtrays and tablecloths. He was accompanied by Toshiaki Furukawa, his employee and table tennis acolyte. Arriving at their hotel, Furukawa was impressed to see that it had a table tennis table in the lobby. Two Chinese porters stood on either side wearing white dress shirts. “You might as well have a knockabout with them,” Ogi said as he checked in. The first porter could barely return a lob. The second started slowly, then raised the pace—until, soon enough, Furukawa was being spun around the lobby. The porter put down his paddle, then slowly unbuttoned his shirt. Underneath was the bright red uniform of China’s national table tennis team. The player carried with him an invitation for Ogimura Trading to play a friendly game in Beijing days later. Ogi jumped at the opportunity, and the match, watched by 15,000 spectators, was the first the Chinese team had played on the international stage in years.

The Chinese seemed to be warming to Ogi’s plan, but attending the World Championships still presented problems for Zhou. The United States would be attending, and while America’s political relations with Japan were strong, China still had no official relationship with either country.

Zhou’s next move was to reach out to Koji Goto, the 64-year-old president of Japan’s table tennis association who was nicknamed “shogun” because he resembled one of those proud samurais so frequently disemboweled in Akira Kurosawa’s films. Not even a year earlier, the Chinese press had labeled Goto a “reactionary” for having committed the cardinal sin of inviting Taiwan—which Mao adamantly believed was part of China, not its own nation—to play in a regional tournament. Yet unexpectedly, Goto received an invitation to visit Zhou in January 1971.

On his way to meet the premier, Goto was thinking purely of Sino-Japanese relations. The idea of a U.S.-China rapprochement would have seemed outlandish to any Japanese, and Goto had no reason to do the United States any favors. In 1944, American bombs had set fire to the school his family ran in Nagoya. Another bomb hit the hospital where his youngest son was being treated for pneumonia. After receiving death threats in response to his decision to go to China, Goto opted for a disguise on his flight to Beijing: a hunting cap, glasses and a mask (which must have made him only more conspicuous).

In Beijing, the reason for his invitation finally became clear. After years of silence, Zhou was contemplating sending the Chinese team to compete in Nagoya. But Goto would have to pay a heavy fee for the privilege of hosting China’s coming-out party: abandoning support of Taiwan, even within the regional body of the Asian Table Tennis Union. Implicit in this was Goto’s rejection of the “Two Chinas” solution, which would have allowed both Taiwan and China to be represented. Zhou was asking a body that was supposed to be nonpolitical to take a highly political stand. Goto conceded, and on Feb. 1, 1971, he finally announced that China would be participating in the World Championships. He was inundated with calls from TV stations trying to negotiate the rights to air the championships, and after receiving more death threats, he was given round-the-clock protection from the Japanese government—highly unusual for a citizen.

Zhou, meanwhile, was left to convince his own table tennis squad to go to Nagoya. He called a meeting with the team on March 11 and asked for their opinion as to whether they wished to compete in Japan. What were they supposed to say? For five years their situation had gradually deteriorated. In 1966, they had been the most famous men and women in China, winners of numerous gold medals, invited to go on holiday with the leaders of China. Yet during the Cultural Revolution, almost all had suffered. There had been interrogations, beatings, accusations, suicides, even a reputed murder. The survivors had been exiled from Beijing, sent to the countryside of Shanxi to pick wheat, after being accused en masse of “trophyism”—chasing short-term glory abroad. It was no coincidence that the three squad members who died had all been born in Hong Kong; nothing was more terrifying in the Cultural Revolution than associations with anything foreign. Now, it seemed a ridiculous notion that they would soon be in Japan playing in a televised World Championships. And what would happen if the Chinese were drawn to play the Americans? Although a handful of the Chinese players thought they should attend, the majority carried the day and voted to remain in China, indoctrinated for years to believe there was nothing to learn from foreign countries.

But it really didn’t matter what they thought—the final word came directly from Mao. Agreeing with Zhou that the team should leave for Nagoya, Mao wrote the players a note conveying his good-luck wishes—and telling them “to prepare for death.” Japan was a rightist country—there was a healthy chance of a bombing or an assassination. Mao added to Zhou, “We should be prepared to lose a few people; of course, it will be better if we don’t.”

* * *

While the Chinese world champions were being swept up into the Cultural Revolution, across the globe Glenn Cowan was still a kid, the oldest son of a middle-class Jewish family from New Rochelle, N.Y. Cowan was one of those boys who seemed to be able to pick up any sport, but he was smitten with table tennis for the simple reason that he won the first tournament he had ever entered, within a week of taking up the game. Then he won the next 17 in a row.

Cowan’s father, who worked in public relations in Manhattan, put a table above the family’s garage, a lopsided affair on an uneven floor. On the weekends, he would occasionally take his son into the city to match up against older players at a seedy club in the basement of the Riverside Plaza Hotel on West 73rd St. At age 14, Cowan traveled with his father across the country to compete in a tournament in Los Angeles. In an interview with the Los Angeles Times,Cowan, with his big smile and Leave It to Beaver crew cut, explained that table tennis just wasn’t that hard for him. “The most amazing thing,” the newspaper said, “is that he seldom practices.” The Chinese coaches would have been horrified. But why should Cowan be serious about the sport? There was no money in the American game. Even the 14-year-old Cowan seemed to realize this, telling the L.A. Times he planned to study finance or law after high school.

Father and son had enjoyed their trip to Los Angeles so much that they persuaded Glenn’s mother and younger brother, Keith, to move there in 1966. But the next year, everything changed for Cowan when his doting father, his main practice partner and nurturer of his fledgling career, died abruptly of lung cancer. In the following years, Cowan’s hair grew down past his shoulders, and his attitude changed. It was a time when culture and counterculture overlapped. For Cowan, that meant an odd mixture of hypercompetitiveness and California-style relaxation—namely, table tennis and smoking pot. Ping pong was a small-enough sport that Cowan could often just show up at his local spot in Hollywood, hustle a few dollars in winnings and travel to win a regional tournament on the weekend. By the turn of the decade, his mother estimated that her teenager had won “over a hundred trophies.”

In early 1971, the best American players in the country gathered at the Convention Center in Atlanta, Ga., for the U.S. Nationals—which underscored all that was wrong with American table tennis. First came the humiliation of having dozens of competitors show up, only to find that they had been displaced from the main auditorium by El Mongol, a not-so-famous wrestler. The floors the competitors ended playing on were waxed so well they were sliding into cardboard advertisements surrounding the courts. And with the play divided between two different floors separated by a maze of passageways, some players were scratched from the roster for not finding their tables in time. Attendance was pitiful—just 400 people came out to watch—and there wasn’t a breath of media coverage. In the hype of American sport, table tennis had been forgotten.

The U.S. team that emerged from Atlanta would bump, trip and beg its way to Nagoya. The United States Table Tennis Association (USTTA) could only afford to send three men from the organization; other players paid their own way, scraping together money through donations and bank loans. None of the Americans expected to win a World Championship. Some members of the USTTA had even wondered if it was worth sending such a poor team. Tim Boggan, the USTTA’s vice president who traveled with the squad to Nagoya, violently opposed those doubters. At 40, he was America’s ultimate table tennis obsessive, a gray-bearded Pepys of ping pong who believed that if the unpaid bureaucrats in the American game would just step out of the way, the sport would be able to shine by itself . “How the fuck were we going to get good if we stayed playing in the basement?” he said.

* * *

In Japan, almost all teams were housed in the Nagoya Miyako Hotel, a bleak box that looked like an inhospitable cheese grater. In the lobby a Japanese torch singer warbled American love songs from World War II. Pajamas and slippers were provided for the players. Buses from the hotel to the Aichi Gymnasium, home of the 31st World Championships, ran every 30 minutes.

On the first night of play, Sunday, March 28, the 58 teams paraded through the arena for the opening ceremony. The Chinese entered in much the same manner as their army stomped through Tiananmen Square every October to celebrate the foundation of the People’s Republic of China—arms swinging vigorously back and forth, perfectly synchronized in their red tracksuits. Every country had outfitted their players in uniforms for the event except for the beleaguered American team, which made its lap of honor in an assortment of colors and styles.

The matches proceeded just as Team USA had feared, starting with the sad sight of the empty-handed American captain, Jack Howard, stepping forward to greet his counterpart from Hong Kong—the USTTA hadn’t provided him with the traditional pennant to swap. The Americans lost 5–1 to Hong Kong and 5–0 to South Korea. Cowan, losing to a better player, beseeched Howard for advice: “You got to tell me what to do out there. You got to tell me what to do!” But Howard wasn’t a coach, and he had no cure for the desperate state of American table tennis. Thanks to Ivor Montagu, ping pong was now a game in which state-sponsored professionals dominated amateurs. Only a handful of countries that competed at the top, while the other 53 nations lagged far behind.

The Chinese team, meanwhile, had a different set of concerns. Zhou Enlai picked a decorated air force veteran to organize the details of the team’s flight—on two separate planes, for maximum safety. Before their departure, the premier gathered the team in Beijing one last time. “Go,” he told his ambassadors. “Rejoin the international family.”

When the first plane landed, to his relief one of the team’s coaches, Liang Youneng, saw among a large crowd on the tarmac a handful of people holding the Little Red Book aloft. “Long Live Mao!” they shouted. Across the runway, Liang saw a larger group—Japanese rightists who were swarming toward them, furiously bellowing “Down with Mao!” The police tried to hurry the ping pong players toward safety. “I couldn’t even feel my feet on the ground,” Liang remembers. “I was pushed by the crowd to the car.” Perhaps Mao’s warning wasn’t an exaggeration. Ping pong players might really be killed on the streets of Nagoya.

Everywhere the Chinese went, they were accompanied by a convoy of police officers on motorbikes. While most of the teams would be sharing a hotel and transport, the Chinese had their own buses and had made their own hotel arrangements. The assigned Japanese security wore tiny pins so that the Chinese players could identify them in an emergency. At night, as the players tried to sleep, they could hear the chants of Japanese demonstrators drift up to their windows. “Drive! Drive! Drive! Drive away the Chinese!” The team watched the Chinese national flag burning on the street beneath their hotel. They watched portraits of Mao spark, light and burst into flames. To ensure the players’ safety, a handful of Japanese Communists slept in the corridor outside the Chinese team’s rooms “with only some newspapers underneath and overcoats for covering.”

It was understood that the Chinese team wasn’t necessarily there to win the tournament. There were clear political reasons too—they were required to report to Beijing three times a day about what they saw and with whom they interacted. They were instructed to analyze draws for the possible political implications of facing certain opponents, and Beijing might command them to purposely lose a match for diplomacy’s sake; this was the case when the Chinese faced North Korea, whose dictatorial leader, Kim Il-sung, Zhou wanted to show a gesture of friendship.As ever, Chinese government officials knew what was happening at the tournament at nearly every moment. The players were simply pawns to be moved where Beijing needed.

On the courts, the Chinese were doing better than they had hoped heading toward the inevitable clash with Japan. They practiced feverishly on the days when they didn’t have matches and occasionally mixed with the North Koreans and players from other friendly countries. They could spot an American at a distance; they were like small clouds of radioactivity that were best avoided. With the Cultural Revolution in the back of their minds, both players and officials knew that direct contact with Americans could still be interpreted as counterrevolutionary behavior.

But there was only so much the Chinese could do. One day, one of China’s youngest players was finishing up a practice session when an odd apparition appeared before him. Glenn Cowan was gesturing for the young man to join him. The Chinese man was horrified by the long-haired, head-banded teenager—an American. Was the the invitation an insult, an American attempt to hoodwink him because he was so young? The Chinese player retreated from the court to ask a Chinese official what he should do. What if Cowan had been told to approach the Chinese by an American official? Go back, was the advice from the Chinese delegation, play for a short time and then excuse yourself. Once taught to revile foreigners, the players were now instructed to engage with them.

The team championship came down to the expected matchup between the Japanese and the Chinese, who edged the competition. The singles tournament, however, took a surprise turn when China’s Zhuang Zedong, then their three-time world champion, announced in a press conference that he was withdrawing. Before he could meet a higher-ranking European player, he would have to defeat a young Cambodian. Zhuang sat in front of dozens of microphones and patiently explained that he refused to compete against the squads from Cambodia and Vietnam, who represented governments that were propped up by the West and that the Cambodian and Vietnamese people didn’t approve of. It was pure strategy, a plan devised a month before by Zhou Enlai to throw a bone to the radicals back in Beijing. Zhou had walked sport across a tightrope to satisfy both sides of the Chinese political spectrum. The hard-line nationalists of the Cultural Revolution could take comfort in Zhuang’s show of solidarity with American adversaries. But, as it would soon become clear, by keeping the team in the group competition, Zhou and his pragmatists had another diplomatic goal in mind.

* * *

The climactic diplomatic moment of the tournament came in an incident that on its surface appeared to take place purely by chance.

On Monday, April 5, when Glenn Cowan walked out of the practice hall after a game with a young Englishman, there was a bus waiting outside. Cowan presumed it was one of the shuttles running between the practice hall and the stadium, but it seemed to be full. According to the Chinese, Cowan stumbled up the steps, the bus doors shut and the driver drove off. Only then did Cowan realize that he was the lone American on a bus full of Communist Chinese.

Cowan’s version of the incident is significantly different. “I was invited actually to board the Chinese bus with the team, which shocked me, of course,” he later said. Both parties agree that a few minutes of silence followed, other than the mechanical roar of a large bus changing gears. Cowan was in a country where he couldn’t even read a street sign, with players representing a supposedly hostile nation. These were the dreaded Red Chinese.

Ever since he had approached the young Chinese player for a knockabout, Cowan had been convinced that the Chinese were watching him. He looked up at one point and spotted Zhuang Zedong staring at him from the crowd. “It was really weird,” he later told Tim Boggan. In the bus, Cowan decided to defuse the awkwardness and started talking to the Chinese group through their English-speaking interpreter. “I know all this,” he began, “my hat, my hair, my clothes look funny to you. But there are many, many people who look like me and who think like me. We, too, have known oppression in our country, and we are fighting against it. But just wait. Soon we will be in control because the people on top are getting more and more out of touch.”

The translator explained in Chinese. Was Cowan actually talking about Mao’s continuous revolution coming to America? Who was Cowan speaking on behalf of? Cowan told his roommate later that he was trying “to think like a revolutionary.” The Chinese players exchanged sideways glances. Who would speak to an American? The orders had been strict back in Beijing: Americans could be greeted politely, but they were the only country at the World Championships with whom the Chinese players shouldn’t shake hands. What to do now? Which of them had waved him onto the bus? Why had they done it if they didn’t even want to talk to him?

From the back of the bus, Zhuang, China’s greatest-ever player, stood up and walked forward. His teammates tugged at his sleeves. One whispered, “What are you going to do?” Another said quietly, “Don’t even talk to him.” Zhuang walked all the way to the front, where Cowan was sitting. In Zhuang’s right hand, he carried a gift. Not just a Mao pin, a badge with the Chairman’s profile, but a silkscreen portrait of the Huangshan Mountains. He offered Cowan his hand to shake and handed him the gift. Cowan beamed in surprise. “Even now,” Zhuang said 35 years later, “I can’t forget the naive smile on his face.”

“Do you know who’s giving you this gift?” asked the interpreter. “Sure,” said Cowan. “It’s Zhuang Zedong.” He looked at the champion and smiled again. “I hope you do well this week.”

There are two ways to interpret Zhuang’s behavior. The first is to take every interview he’s ever given at face value. All his actions that day, he claims, were influenced by his personal commitment to Confucianism—a general belief in openness and reconciliation. By Zhuang’s account, he was willing to go against everything that had been drilled into the team over the last five years, including the knowledge that “during the Cultural Revolution a lot of people got arrested from contacting foreigners and everyone was afraid.”

Or were Zhuang’s actions premeditated? This was the man who had seen three of his oldest colleagues and mentors driven to death as counterrevolutionaries because of their ties to foreigners. He had been beaten and tortured and had his head shaved. Under extraordinary pressure, he had signed a statement denouncing high-ranking generals and team officials. The accusations against them were weak; none of the Chinese deemed guilty during the Cultural Revolution had ever instigated contact with a citizen of a hostile nation. In all likelihood, Zhuang felt compelled to do as he was directed by Beijing; he had already shown that he was in Nagoya to represent the wishes of the Chinese Communist Party by withdrawing from the men’s singles competition on direct government instructions. As the most senior player, he was, in his own words, the first to be asked to “represent our team.” Even if the actual moment on the bus was spontaneous, the context could very well have been premeditated in the extreme. Cowan was more like a mark in a con game than an accidental diplomat.

Cowan had most likely been selected because he had already tried to reach out to the Chinese in the practice hall, making them almost certain that he would behave in a friendly way. The Chinese bus had waited for him even though the Chinese had their own bus, hotel and training facility. The fact that it picked up Cowan and then departed without waiting for other players suggests it was Cowan they were waiting for. And how could Zhuang explain the fact that he was carrying a gift when even the most senior players were allowed to carry only tiny souvenirs, like Mao pins, to exchange?

Despite always maintaining that the moment was spontaneous, Zhuang once admitted, “Before I left China, I went to a warehouse to get a large silkscreen portrait, for an American. I thought it had to be a large one.” The Chinese Foreign Ministry “kept a warehouse, very carefully graded,” filled with gifts for foreign dignitaries. In other words, it was always decided in advance exactly what level of gift a diplomat would receive.

* * *

When Zhuang and Cowan stepped down from the bus at the Aichi stadium, a group of photographers was waiting. Photographs of the two grinning players were printed on the front pages of every Japanese newspaper the following morning, and immediately picked up by the Associated Press. They also ran in one of the world’s most important newspapers with a tiny circulation, specially edited for the leaders of the Chinese Communist Party. When he reached page 78, Mao peered closely at the picture of the two beaming athletes. The Californian and the former world champion had the chairman’s full attention. “Zhuang Zedong,” Mao reportedly mused. “He’s not just a good table tennis player. He’s a good diplomat as well.” The chairman immediately gave instructions that the Chinese team increase its calls to Beijing from three to five times a day.

Now that the Chinese and American players had reached out to each other, the officials might be able to do the same. For now, though, there was still silence. The Chinese suspected that the U.S. team was being run by Washington in the way that theirs was commandeered from Beijing. There had even been a rumor that the CIA had stocked its Langley, Va., headquarters with ping pong equipment in anticipation of the Chinese team’s trip to Nagoya, and that an American intelligence agent might infiltrate the tournament. It would take several more months and tricky backchannel negotiations, particularly over Taiwan,before Nixon was ready to make his historic 1972 trip to China.

For his part, Cowan, the shaggy-haired son of a PR man, knew an opportunity in Nagoya when he saw it. He didn’t have any more games to play in the tournament, having crashed out of the first rounds of both the singles and the consolation tournaments. Instead, while still in Japan, he went shopping for a return present for Zhuang. He ended up buying two T-shirts, one for him and one for Zhuang. They were white and long-sleeved, with a peace symbol in the corner of a painted American flag. Underneath, in large letters, was the Beatles’ lyric that Paul McCartney had written two years earlier at the height of his acrimony with John Lennon: “Let it be.” All Cowan had to do was confirm from the schedule that the Chinese were due to play the following morning at 8:30 and then go to wait for Zhuang.

The second photo op within 24 hours was even better attended than the first. When Zhuang arrived, Cowan, who had already been walking around the practice hall showing off the silkscreen, was waiting. Now he stepped forward in front of the photographers. “He gave me a big hug,” remembered Zhuang, and the cameras blazed.

The press turned the moment into a spontaneous gesture of two innocents thirsting after world peace. But the political implications were far grander. For Zhou Enlai, the meeting was the seamless projection of state policy; for Richard Nixon and his national security adviser, Henry Kissinger, it would be perfectly acceptable too, since it furthered their own designs to engage with China. Kissinger would later suspect the moment of friendship might have been manufactured in Beijing. In 1979, he wrote that “one of the most remarkable gifts of the Chinese is to make the meticulously planned appear spontaneous.”

What’s clear is that the moment was the justification of Ivor Montagu’s belief in ping pong as a form of diplomacy. The correct deployment of propaganda in sports provides the illusion of a space that seems neutral. You get the advantage of being seen as openhanded at a moment of thorough calculation. Ping pong diplomacy was a tribute to Zhou Enlai’s exacting preparation. Table tennis had been political in China since its official adoption in 1953 and had remained malleable enough to be the correct tool at the correct time—but only if everything went according to plan.

And while the Chinese could control their own squad, they knew little of the U.S. team. What would a radicalized American university student do when he reached Red China? No wonder the press attention would be immediate and overwhelming; for the next month ping pong players were finally going to dominate world headlines, even in the United States. They were Montagu’s dream embodied: ping-pong playing catalysts that would come to change the Cold War.